A review of Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated:Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism

It
is not news that the United States is in great trouble. The pre-emptive war it
launched against Iraq more than five years ago was and is a mistake of
monumental proportions — one that most Americans still fail to acknowledge.
Instead they are arguing about whether we should push on to "victory"
when even our own generals tell us that a military victory is today
inconceivable. Our economy has been hollowed out by excessive military spending
over many decades while our competitors have devoted themselves to investments
in lucrative new industries that serve civilian needs. Our political system of
checks and balances has been virtually destroyed by rampant cronyism and
corruption in Washington, D.C., and by a two-term president who goes around
crowing "I am the decider," a concept fundamentally hostile to our
constitutional system. We have allowed our elections, the one nonnegotiable
institution in a democracy, to be debased and hijacked — as was the 2000
presidential election in Florida — with scarcely any protest from the public or
the self-proclaimed press guardians of the "Fourth Estate." We now
engage in torture of defenseless prisoners although it defames and demoralizes
our armed forces and intelligence agencies.

The problem is that there are too
many things going wrong at the same time for anyone to have a broad
understanding of the disaster that has overcome us and what, if anything, can
be done to return our country to constitutional government and at least a
degree of democracy. By now, there are hundreds of books on particular aspects
of our situation — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bloated and unsupervised
"defense" budgets, the imperial presidency and its contempt for our
civil liberties, the widespread privatization of traditional governmental
functions, and a political system in which no leader dares even to utter the
words imperialism and militarism in public.

There are, however, a few attempts
at more complex analyses of how we arrived at this sorry state. They include
Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,"
on how "private" economic power now is almost coequal with legitimate
political power; John W. Dean, "Broken Government: How Republican Rule
Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches," on the
perversion of our main defenses against dictatorship and tyranny; Arianna
Huffington, "Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America,
Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe," on the manipulation
of fear in our political life and the primary role played by the media; and
Naomi Wolf, "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young
Patriot," on "Ten Steps to Fascism" and where we currently stand
on this staircase. My own book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic," on militarism as an inescapable accompaniment of imperialism,
also belongs to this genre.

We now have a new, comprehensive
diagnosis of our failings as a democratic polity by one of our most seasoned
and respected political philosophers. For well over two generations, Sheldon Wolin taught the history of political
philosophy from Plato to the present to Berkeley and Princeton graduate
students (including me; I took his seminars at Berkeley in the late 1950s, thus
influencing my approach to political science ever since). He is the author of
the prize-winning classic "Politics and Vision" (1960; expanded edition,
2006) and "Tocqueville Between Two Worlds" (2001), among many other
works.

His new book, "Democracy
Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted
Totalitarianism," is a devastating critique of the contemporary government
of the United States — including what has happened to it in recent years and what
must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic
totalitarian predecessors: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia.
The hour is very late and the possibility that the American people might pay
attention to what is wrong and take the difficult steps to avoid a national Götterdämmerung are remote, but Wolin’s
is the best analysis of why the presidential election of 2008 probably will not
do anything to mitigate our fate. This book demonstrates why political science,
properly practiced, is the master social science.

Wolin’s work is fully accessible.
Understanding his argument does not depend on possessing any specialized
knowledge, but it would still be wise to read him in short bursts and think
about what he is saying before moving on. His analysis of the contemporary
American crisis relies on a historical perspective going back to the original
constitutional agreement of 1789 and includes particular attention to the
advanced levels of social democracy attained during the New Deal and the contemporary mythology that
the U.S., beginning during World War II, wields unprecedented world power.

Given this historical backdrop,
Wolin introduces three new concepts to help analyze what we have lost as a
nation. His master idea is "inverted totalitarianism," which is
reinforced by two subordinate notions that accompany and promote
it — "managed democracy" and "Superpower," the latter always
capitalized and used without a direct article. Until the reader gets used to
this particular literary tic, the term Superpower
can be confusing. The author uses it as if it were an independent agent,
comparable to Superman or Spiderman, and one that is inherently
incompatible with constitutional government and democracy.

Wolin writes, "Our thesis ...
is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the
classical one, to evolve from a putatively ‘strong democracy’ instead of a
‘failed’ one." His understanding of democracy is classical but also
populist, anti-elitist and only slightly represented in the Constitution of the
United States. "Democracy," he writes, "is about the conditions
that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming
political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs."
It depends on the existence of a demos — "a
politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and
occupied all branches of public office." Wolin argues that to the extent
the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because
its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was
written into the Constitution.

"No working man or ordinary
farmer or shopkeeper," Wolin points out, "helped to write the
Constitution." He argues, "The American political system was not born
a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by
those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic
advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete. The republic existed for
three-quarters of a century before formal slavery was ended; another hundred
years before black Americans were assured of their voting rights. Only in the
twentieth century were women guaranteed the vote and trade unions the right to
bargain collectively. In none of these instances has victory been complete:
women still lack full equality, racism persists, and the destruction of the
remnants of trade unions remains a goal of corporate strategies. Far from being
innate, democracy in America has gone against the grain, against the very forms
by which the political and economic power of the country has been and continues
to be ordered." Wolin can easily control his enthusiasm for James Madison,
the primary author of the Constitution, and he sees the New Deal as perhaps the
only period of American history in which rule by a true demos prevailed.

To reduce a complex argument to its
bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and
Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted
totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version
but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political
disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private
media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces
the official version of events. It is inverted because it does not require the
use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist
and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest
percentage of its citizens in prison — 751 per 100,000 people — of any nation on
Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has "emerged
imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the
nation’s political traditions."

The genius of our inverted
totalitarian system "lies in wielding total power without appearing to,
without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity,
or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual.
... A demotion in the status and stature of the ‘sovereign people’ to patient
subjects is symptomatic of systemic change, from democracy as a method of
‘popularizing’ power to democracy as a brand name for a product marketable at
home and marketable abroad. ... The new system, inverted totalitarianism, is one
that professes the opposite of what, in fact, it is. ... The United States has
become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be
suppressed."

Among the factors that have promoted
inverted totalitarianism are the practice and psychology of advertising and the
rule of "market forces" in many other contexts than markets,
continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer
games, virtual avatars, space travel), the penetration of mass media communication
and propaganda into every household in the country, and the total co-optation
of the universities. Among the commonplace fables of our society are hero
worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through
surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of
ever-expanding control and possibility, whose adepts are prone to fantasies
because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.
Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation. Wolin
reminds us that the image of Adolf Hitler flying to Nuremberg in 1934 that
opens Leni Riefenstahl’s classic film "Triumph of the Will" was repeated on May 1,
2003, with President George Bush’s apparent landing of a Navy warplane on the
flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to proclaim "Mission
Accomplished" in Iraq.

On inverted totalitarianism’s
"self-pacifying" university campuses compared with the usual
intellectual turmoil surrounding independent centers of learning, Wolin writes,
"Through a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation
funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and
wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research
universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly
integrated into the system. No books burned, no refugee Einsteins. For the
first time in the history of American higher education top professors are made
wealthy by the system, commanding salaries and perks that a budding CEO might
envy."

The main social sectors promoting
and reinforcing this modern Shangri-La are corporate power, which is in charge
of managed democracy, and the military-industrial complex, which is in charge
of Superpower. The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the
profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy
(Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and
so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its
primary tool is privatization. Managed democracy aims at the "selective
abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the
citizenry" under cover of improving "efficiency" and
cost-cutting.

Wolin argues, "The
privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady evolution
of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant
partner with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics and
its political culture from a system in which democratic practices and values
were, if not defining, at least major contributing elements, to one where the
remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being
systematically dismantled." This campaign has largely succeeded.
"Democracy represented a challenge to the status quo, today it has become
adjusted to the status quo."

One other subordinate task of
managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or
private conditions of human life so that they fail to focus on the widespread
corruption and betrayal of the public trust. In Wolin’s words, "The point
about disputes on such topics as the value of sexual abstinence, the role of
religious charities in state-funded activities, the question of gay marriage,
and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved. Their political
function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and
diverting the voters’ attention from the social and economic concerns of the
general populace." Prominent examples of the elite use of such incidents
to divide and inflame the public are the Terri Schiavo case of 2005, in which a
brain-dead woman was kept artificially alive, and the 2008 case of women and
children living in a polygamous commune in Texas who were
allegedly sexually mistreated.

Another elite tactic of managed
democracy is to bore the electorate to such an extent that it gradually fails
to pay any attention to politics. Wolin perceives, "One method of assuring
control is to make electioneering continuous, year-round, saturated with party
propaganda, punctuated with the wisdom of kept pundits, bringing a result
boring rather than energizing, the kind of civic lassitude on which managed
democracy thrives." The classic example is certainly the nominating contests
of the two main American political parties during 2007 and 2008, but the
dynastic "competition" between the Bush and Clinton families from
1988 to 2008 is equally relevant. It should be noted that between a half and
two-thirds of qualified voters have recently failed to vote, thus making the
management of the active electorate far easier. Wolin comments, "Every
apathetic citizen is a silent enlistee in the cause of inverted
totalitarianism." It remains to be seen whether an Obama candidacy can reawaken
these apathetic voters, but I suspect that Wolin would predict a barrage of
corporate media character assassination that would end this possibility.

Managed democracy is a powerful
solvent for any vestiges of democracy left in the American political system, but
its powers are weak in comparison with those of Superpower. Superpower is the
sponsor, defender and manager of American imperialism and militarism, aspects
of American government that have always been dominated by elites, enveloped in
executive-branch secrecy, and allegedly beyond the ken of ordinary citizens to
understand or oversee. Superpower is preoccupied with weapons of mass
destruction, clandestine manipulation of foreign policy (sometimes domestic
policy, too), military operations, and the fantastic sums of money demanded
from the public by the military-industrial complex. (The U.S. military spends
more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense
budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military
budget is China’s at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence
Agency.)

Foreign military operations
literally force democracy to change its nature: "In order to cope with the
imperial contingencies of foreign war and occupation," according to Wolin,
"democracy will alter its character, not only by assuming new behaviors
abroad (e.g., ruthlessness, indifference to suffering, disregard of local
norms, the inequalities in ruling a subject population) but also by operating
on revised, power-expansive assumptions at home. It will, more often than not,
try to manipulate the public rather than engage its members in deliberation. It
will demand greater powers and broader discretion in their use (‘state
secrets’), a tighter control over society’s resources, more summary methods of
justice, and less patience for legalities, opposition, and clamor for
socioeconomic reforms."

Imperialism and democracy are, in
Wolin’s terms, literally incompatible, and the ever greater resources devoted
to imperialism mean that democracy will inevitably wither and die. He writes,
"Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the
latter’s conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It
makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could ‘participate’
substantively in imperial politics; hence it is not surprising that the subject
of empire is taboo in electoral debates. No major politician or party has so
much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire."

From the time of the United States’
founding, its citizens have had a long history of being complicit in the
country’s imperial ventures, including its transcontinental expansion at the
expense of native Americans, Mexicans and Spanish imperialists. Theodore
Roosevelt often commented that Americans were deeply opposed to imperialism
because of their successful escape from the British empire but that "expansionism" was in their blood. Over
the years, American political analysis has carefully tried to separate the
military from imperialism, even though militarism is imperialism’s inescapable
accompaniment. The military creates the empire in the first place and is
indispensable to its defense, policing and expansion. Wolin observes,
"That the patriotic citizen unswervingly supports the military and its
huge budgets means that conservatives have succeeded in persuading the public
that the military is distinct from the government. Thus the most substantial
element of state power is removed from public debate."

It has taken a long time, but under
George W. Bush’s administration the United States has finally achieved an
official ideology of imperial expansion comparable to those of Nazi and Soviet
totalitarianisms. In accordance with the National Security Strategy of the United States
(allegedly drafted by Condoleezza Rice and proclaimed on Sept. 9, 2002), the
United States is now committed to what it calls "preemptive war."
Wolin explains: "Preemptive war entails the projection of power abroad,
usually against a far weaker country, comparable say, to the Nazi invasion of
Belgium and Holland in 1940. It declares that the United States is justified in
striking at another country because of a perceived threat that U.S. power will
be weakened, severely damaged, unless it reacts to eliminate the danger before
it materializes. Preemptive war is Lebensraum[Hitler’s claim that his imperialism
was justified by Germany’s need for "living room"] for the age of
terrorism." This was, of course, the official excuse for the American
aggression against Iraq that began in 2003.

Many analysts, myself included,
would conclude that Wolin has made a close to airtight case that the American
republic’s days are numbered, but Wolin himself does not agree. Toward the end
of his study he produces a wish list of things that should be done to ward off
the disaster of inverted totalitarianism: "rolling back the empire,
rolling back the practices of managed democracy; returning to the idea and
practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalization
and preemptive strikes; restoring and strengthening environmental protections;
reinvigorating populist politics; undoing the damage to our system of
individual rights; restoring the institutions of an independent judiciary,
separation of powers, and checks and balances; reinstating the integrity of the
independent regulatory agencies and of scientific advisory processes; reviving
representative systems responsive to popular needs for health care, education,
guaranteed pensions, and an honorable minimum wage; restoring governmental
regulatory authority over the economy; and rolling back the distortions of a
tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power."

Unfortunately, this is more a guide
to what has gone wrong than a statement of how to fix it, particularly since
Wolin believes that our political system is "shot through with corruption
and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors."
It is extremely unlikely that our party apparatus will work to bring the
military-industrial complex and the 16 secret intelligence agencies under democratic control.
Nonetheless, once the United States has followed the classical totalitarianisms
into the dustbin of history, Wolin’s analysis will stand as one of the best
discourses on where we went wrong.

Copyright 2008 Chalmers Johnson

Chalmers Johnson’s latest book is
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,now available in a
Holt Paperback. It is the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy.

A copy of the entire Serendipity website is available on CD-ROM. Details here.